For flutes I-II, oboes I-II, clarinets I-II, bassoons I-II; horns I-IV, trumpets I-II; timpani; strings
Begun July 1829 in Edinburgh, continued 1841-42, completed 20 January 1842 in Berlin; dedicated to Queen Victoria
First performed 3 March 1842 by the Leipzig Gwandhaus Orchestra, Mendelssohn conducting
Published by Breitkopf & Hartel (Leipzig, 1843). Inexpensive score: Felix Mendelssohn: Major Orchestral Works (New York: Dover, 1975)
Duration: about 40 minutes

As was the custom for scions of well-bred families of the nineteenth century, Mendelssohn completed his artistic formation with a grand tour of Europe and Great Britain. Travel is always a superb finishing school, and Mendelssohn’s came at a time when musical language across the continent was mutating by leaps and bounds. His letters home are filled with observations on the artists he encountered, the music he heard, and the various landscapes, colours, and folk practices that drew his attention along the way. It was a time of one inspiration after another, and later he often returned to the sketches he had made en route for the substance of a major composition.

In 1829, during his first trip to Great Britian, Mendelssohn traveled to Scotland, then as now a strangely timeless land bursting with the kinds of imagery that seduced those of Romantic inclination. There he met Sir Walter Scott, already venerated as a father of Romanticism; at Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh, overgrown palace of Mary Queen of Scots, he first conceived the material for the Andante that begins the “Scottish” Symphony -a passage redolent with the pensiveness and wonder of our promenades in history’s abandoned corridors. From this germinal phrase grows a good deal of the material to follow.

But it was to be many years before the symphony was completed and performed. The “Scottish” Symphony in fact represents Mendelssohn’s valedictory in the genre. It is also his symphonic masterpiece -novel yet convincing of formal organization (the movements, for example, played without interruption), vivid of orchestration and melody. Yet for all the exoticism of locale, it isn’t worthwhile to search for a particular story: what you are probably meant to envisage is a collage of images of Scotland past and present -suggestions of its tempestuous political history, its folk idioms, and (not least) its ever-changing weather.

While there are some obvious bows to Classical practice in the fifty-odd-bar Andante, the prevailing sensation is of being suspended over evolution of the languid opening material. The sonata proper begins with the new tempo and meter, an Allegro un poco agitato  in 6/8 with first theme elaborating the melody of the Andante . A leisurely transition begins with the trumpeting tutti and continues in a near -fugal texture; the closing theme, squarely in E minor (not the C major you might expect), hints at a barcarole rhythm. From the motivic counterpoint and fragmentation in the development emerges a broad countermelody in the cellos , over which, eventually, the recapitulation commences. During the coda, there is an obvious storm at sea, with timpani thunder; surges and ebbs from the violins overlap those in the low strings. There is a brief reprise of the opening Andante and a pizzicato close.

The second movement is equally imaginative in form-part scherzo, part highland fling, with motion by relentless sixteenth notes. It’s a frantic, almost fiendish showpiece, slipping from time to time (especially at the second theme) into the string pianissimo staccato at which Mendelssohn always excels. Note that the main theme is based on that of the first-movement Andante; once again there is a pizzicato conclusion. Now the pizzicatos become a guitar-like accompaniment to the main theme, for violins, of the third movement. Not only the funereal character of the second episode but also the swells and sighs of the violin line give the movement its strong introspective cast.

The final movement, once marked “warlike,” seems to evoke some undertaking of battle or brigandry -a typically post-Beethovenian struggle and working out. The second theme, heard in the woodwinds over continuous triplets in violins or violas, is a version of the now familiar motto opening; at the close of the movement this is heard again in the solo clarinet over drones in the strings, much subdued. Then the 6/8 returns in major mode, and the motive which has so long dominated the work achieves its resolution. Mendelssohn meant this passage to sound like a male chorus of thanksgiving, the precedent clearly that of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. The effect is, in my view, anticlimactic and a little trivial; but that is a minor flaw in what is otherwise a symphony of exceptional imagination and craft.